early holiday presents

today i opened one of my husband’s culinary books, which i had used as a plant press, and look what popped out. an entire jurassic scene, complete with ferns, ancient trees, and what may be pterodactyls or proto-herons rising up from a shallow-water marsh somewhere. i clearly need to press more plants. who knows what may be waiting for me under the christmas tree?

pressed botanicals from southern france

somewhere between late late fall and early early winter

these are leaves in late autumn, dried and crushed, and so they represent quite accurately “fall color,”  even if we prefer to attribute colors like bright yellow, flame orange, and rust red to the ideal fall color of our nostalgic thoughts. it is still fall here in the languedoc, although it is late fall, and not all the leaves are still clinging to their branches. on the other hand there are trees, like olives and eucalyptus, that keep their leaves all winter long, even though they look like deciduous trees to someone from minnesota. which is a long way of saying that, in week two of december in this very specific corner of france, fall color means these colors. in a week, they will be different. a week ago they were different. this is reason #783 that i love the dailiness of still blog, and hope you do too.

crushed leaves of late autumn in languedoc

survival of the swiftest

i just discovered that mackerel can actually fold their fins into grooves in their bodies to make themselves more hydrodynamic. and look at those forked tails ready to scythe through the water. it’s no wonder that about every tenth mackerel we see in the fishmonger’s display has the tail of another fish protruding from its gullet. they are machines.

mackerel tails

crayola

when i was young, i remember the biggest status symbol in kindergarten and first grade was to come to class not with the 8 color crayola crayon box, nor the 16 color box, nor even the 32 color box, but the big, honkin’ 64 color box that also had the little crayon sharpening hole on the back side. oh what joy to be able to choose between burnt sienna and mahogany. between dandelion and goldenrod. and, most importantly, between cornflower and the very best of all of the 64 colors: periwinkle. i think i am in love with the roadside chicory flowers in france mostly because chicory blue is the closest real life has ever come to imitating the perfection of periwinkle.

chickory

fan palm

to start the week, here are some palmate leaves versus the pinnate leaves of, say, the sumacs which should have attained their peak color and mostly fallen by now, in minnesota. it’s a very nerdy way of saying  i win and you lose. but i spent the afternoon playing “petanque” within sight of Le Canigou, the tallest of the french mediterranean peaks, and i know for a fact that there is snow on the ground, and ice on the lakes, back home in minnesota, and it is not often that i get to brag about the weather, and so i am going to brag while i have the chance.

fan palms in morning mist